After Zhou Qiming brought Chen Mo home for dinner for the first time, there was often an extra pair of chopsticks on the Zhou family's dining table.
In Chenjiawan in 1992, two seven-year-old boys met every day at the fork in the village entrance.
One always said that he was just along for the ride; the other even though he had arrived early, he just kept his head down and kicked stones. They drew a line in the middle of the desk. Later, the homework books were spread out and their arms crossed over again and again. No one bothered to separate again.
They go to the market together, catch fish, stick cicadas, and fight over who gets the broken car plate first to get to the dinner table.
Chen Mo tied bamboo strips and wrapping paper into a kite, and Zhou Qiming held the string and ran on the river dam. The adults called them to go home from across the road, and they promised "right away", but their eyes were still looking at the sky.
At that time, the Chen family was building a new house, and the radio was blaring in the Zhou family's store all day long. The adults are busy living their own lives, while the two children only care about who will arrive at the village entrance first tomorrow morning, which way the small door of the new house should open, and whether the kite can be higher.
They don't know anything about liking.
Regarding each other, they already have a set of rules that no one wants to admit.
This is the story of Chen Mo and Zhou Qiming starting from the age of seven, eating, going to school, and playing together until dark, and then gradually became each other's only exception.
Purpose: When parenting is understood as a debt that must be repaid with marriage, blood, and obedience, when does love begin to turn into ownership? When everyone only did one thing that they thought was reasonable, why did two people finally lose the right to arrange their own lives together?